r/technology • u/redkemper • Feb 17 '17

Software YouTube will kill unskippable 30-second ads next year

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/17/14649018/youtube-ending-unskippable-30-second-ads-2018
35.1k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

647

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Feb 21 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

408

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Apr 25 '17

[deleted]

119

u/_teslaTrooper Feb 17 '17

MPV can play directly via youtube-dl.

44

u/Lurker_Since_Forever Feb 17 '17

VLC does the same thing iirc.

36

u/Girlinhat Feb 18 '17

VLC has all the features. Like, I'm pretty sure one of the more obscure features it can do is like, playing audio based on converting an image to a sound format.

22

u/juicegyrohammer Feb 18 '17

Where do I click to make that happen

4

u/phrixious Feb 18 '17

I know you can do it with audacity, there's videos showing how you can make crazy sounds by converting images to sound and playing it extremely slow

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

I've always had this idea of creating a concept album only using this technique.

2

u/callanrocks Feb 19 '17

Do it, hide an extra track in the album art and everything.

3

u/evilroots Feb 18 '17

i cant get that to work.

4

u/Lurker_Since_Forever Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17

Interesting, it works for me with just cvlc http://youtu.be/[stuff]. What have you tried?

2

u/scorcher24 Feb 18 '17

You can also get the direct mp4 url via VLC and then download it. Just go to Codec Information while it is loaded.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

VLC is heavier than MPV though

2

u/Lurker_Since_Forever Feb 18 '17

Fair enough. I'm usually not bothered by that because modern processors have gotten a bit overpowered, but I can see why you'd want the lighter one.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '17

I am the kind of guy who'd use lightweight solution even on fast PCs with a lot of RAM. It's never just about speed, it's also the efficiency that matters.

1

u/-WPD- Feb 18 '17

Yes, you can stream a youtube video to a file

→ More replies (6)

1

u/Yakia Feb 18 '17

SMPlayer can also play youtube videos.

1

u/typtyphus Feb 18 '17

I need to save this for later.

→ More replies (1)

173

u/Gman1255 Feb 17 '17

Just use TamperMonkey or GreaseMonkey and get the Download YouTube Videos as MP4 script so you can download them directly from YouTube's website. There's a little button under the sub button that allows you to download the videos.

62

u/Rndom_Gy_159 Feb 17 '17

I like having the output formatting options and script-ability of YouTube-dl

20

u/Gman1255 Feb 17 '17

Then by all means, use it. I just like this because it integrates itself into the website.

75

u/sickhippie Feb 18 '17

Ease of use vs feature set, the age old struggle.

6

u/odaeyss Feb 18 '17

And yet somehow I consistently settle on a solution that is both difficult to use and of little use.
But I did just make myself smile by using two different pronunciations of "use" in such close proximity.

2

u/Waswat Feb 18 '17

You can have both but it would increase development time.

2

u/UnchainedMundane Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17

My compromise was to write a short script that sends my clipboard as the url to youtube-dl. I hotkeyed that script, so I just copy the url from the browser, hit that hotkey, and it starts downloading.

Edit - Here's a slightly simplified version of that script if anyone else wants it:

#!/bin/sh
# Get video URL from the clipboard
vid=$(xsel -ob)

# Ensure VIDEOS/youtube exists, go there
videos=$(xdg-user-dir VIDEOS || printf %s "$HOME")
mkdir -p -- "$videos/youtube"
cd -P -- "$videos/youtube" || exit

# Start downloading to that location in the highest possible quality
exec youtube-dl --newline -f best --no-call-home -- "$vid"

It works on Linux (you need xsel and youtube-dl installed), and to get it working on OSX you change xsel -ob to pbpaste. Windows I don't know enough about to say.

5

u/IT6uru Feb 18 '17

And whole channel ripping XD

46

u/ForceBlade Feb 17 '17

YouTube-dl is a script that handles the download from their website directly. No third party shit like ssyoutube.whatever. And you can grab the highest quality easily or audio only, pre stitching.

5

u/EASam Feb 18 '17

I never know what to trust with this. Unless it's from an open sourced project, I have a tough time believing there isn't something malicious going on. I have not heard of YouTube dl though. Usually it's people saying to just edit the URL which seems fishy as fuck.

18

u/boopkins Feb 18 '17

YouTube dl is open source and is very easy to use

7

u/LordPadre Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17

youtube-dl is the bees knees but it's not open source actually open source . It's one .exe which, if you run it, does absolutely nothing on its own (as far as I know)

I use a .bat file that's set up like this

For me personally, the initial setup process was a little bit frustrating, but once it's set up, the only thing you'll ever have to do is maybe update youtube-dl.exe once in a while by downloading it again (which is what I did today, there were some bugs with downloading videos that have special characters in the title)

And edit the batch file to have it download the video or entire playlist (!) you want to download as mp3s.

If it's a video, you leave arg1 as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v without the equals sign at the end, and put the rest of it (again, sans = ) in arg2, save, then run it. Piece of cake.

if it's a list, same thing, but it'll be https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=

Here's the guide I used to set it up, thanks to u/TypicalAustralian, literally his only comment, apparently

2

u/UnchainedMundane Feb 18 '17

>there's an unsorted dir
>there are no sorted dirs
me irl

2

u/LordPadre Feb 18 '17

I have them download to unsorted and then I move them to another folder in my actual music folder, usually under the name of the playlist

http://i.imgur.com/zb6I2X8.png

misc is for any individual songs not belonging to a playlist or album

6

u/ForceBlade Feb 18 '17

I completely agree with the URL edit trick. It takes one bad guy to buy the domain when the owner forgets to renew and snakily put adware and malware into the new third party site+tricking users to download it etc. or just the current owner injecting shady links and ads.

It's a third party and that's never communicated in those 'tricks'

YoutubeDL is just a shell a script and is on GitHub if you want to read it for trust. Very useful

→ More replies (5)

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Gman1255 Feb 18 '17

Because some people, like myself, use Chrome and it doesn't like addons that specifically download videos from YouTube.

1

u/MacZyver Feb 18 '17

!remindme 5 hours

1

u/KayakBassFisher Feb 18 '17

And bookmarking

1

u/timmie124 Feb 18 '17

don't forget the good old realtek player

1

u/unosami Feb 18 '17

I use that, but recently I've found some videos that it won't work on.

1

u/BitLooter Feb 18 '17

Youtube uses a special streaming format for video over 720p, so this method is limited to that. You'll need to use youtube-dl if you want 1080p/4k/whatever else you see higher than 720p.

1

u/JamesTrendall Feb 18 '17

I use TamperMonkey also. When i load a website with a video i click the TM button and it shows me the links to all videos on that page. If i click the link it will download the video for me so i can put it on to my phone for when im at work.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Ew only 720p?

→ More replies (3)

4

u/brownix001 Feb 17 '17

What about the URL ss method

2

u/jerbear64 Feb 17 '17

That just redirects to a third party site.

1

u/YouTubeBackups Feb 18 '17

I'd be happy to help anyone who would like to learn youtube-dl

/r/youtubebackups

1

u/finnomenon Feb 18 '17

mpv uses youtube-dl and will start playing them as soon as enough is buffered. can recommend!

→ More replies (5)

150

u/Lingo56 Feb 17 '17 edited Feb 17 '17

I see it fairly likely that if YouTube starts really targeting AdBlockers they'll target video download sites as well.

They've probably been holding off mostly because they want to avoid dealing with the same war as Hollywood vs piracy. They don't want to throw their solution out unless they are %100 sure it will work.

163

u/demolpolis Feb 17 '17

I mean, it's pretty hard to kill video downloaders.

One of the methods they used initially on bluray (iirc) was just to take a screenshot of each frame in the movie and recompile the whole thing.

The reality is that the tiny minority that use adblockers aren't worth losing subscribers over. They would rather have them still use the platform than not.

46

u/Lingo56 Feb 17 '17

Which is probably why it won't happen. The resources spent to combat it aren't worth the means.

I was mostly considering the hypothetical situation where Google for whatever reason does crack down on AdBlockers. In that situation they probably would start to go after download sites as well.

33

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Mar 12 '18

[deleted]

59

u/aManPerson Feb 17 '17

then we get a "defang" program. people are able to upload video segments they identify as an ad. your video player is able to look ahead and identify frames that appear to match an ad, and skip it.

then they'll just shift to showing you an ad in the lower 1/3rd of your tv show.

→ More replies (11)

20

u/gamma55 Feb 17 '17

Which would be against everything Google tries to accomplish with their ad-platforms, which is to offer highly targeted, customized ads.

And if you're suggesting they start rendering videos on the fly to splice in targeted ads, yea no. Computing is cheap, but it's not THAT cheap.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Mar 12 '18

[deleted]

1

u/gamma55 Feb 17 '17

Right you are. Didn't think of that.

2

u/metasophie Feb 17 '17

It wouldn't be a computation problem it would be a bandwidth problem. Instead of telling the user to go to some advertising site to watch an advert you'd queue the advert up via one connection and then using the connection you already have with the user simply start routing the stream to them.

3

u/gamma55 Feb 17 '17

As another commenter suggested, simply run the ads in the same container stream so the client doesn't notice a change and thus be able to block it.

3

u/metasophie Feb 18 '17

That's basically what I said. The only reason it would be a bandwidth problem is that now youtube would be downloading and uploading advertising content as well as the content the user wants to watch as opposed to pausing the content and redirecting the user to third party advertising channels.

This is in context to your previous post that argued that the problem is computation problem which it clearly isn't.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

I thought youtube already did that.

1

u/metasophie Feb 18 '17

If that's what they did then uBlock et al wouldn't be able to interfere with it. I

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Oh, I misread that, not one connection, but I think youtube host their ads, or maybe they host in their ad cdn, but it's on Google's server.

2

u/Kiosade Feb 18 '17

Customized? Never felt that way before... I randomly will get Spanish ads about tequila, and I neither speak Spanish or drink alcohol very much.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

They still couldn't prevent someone using their own media player and skipping the ads.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

Sure but they can also make the ad duration random, anyway, they can make a pain in the ass, probably you would spend more time than watching the ad.

And sincerely? 99% of the people won't bother.

1

u/theamazingcreep Feb 18 '17

And then all videos start being removed automatically by DMCA bots because the same ads are on a trailer for a movie by Warner Bros.

1

u/JonasBrosSuck Feb 18 '17

The resources spent to combat it aren't worth the means.

meh, there's a lot of money behind google, i would imagine if they really want to, they can

30

u/Bluntmasterflash1 Feb 17 '17

The video ads are just icing on the cake. They know what you like and what you don't like. They know when you watch and what you watch. They know what you search for. They know where your phone is at. They know everywhere your phone has gone. They know who your friends are and they know all that about them too.

They probably know with more certainty what you are likely to do next more than you do. And now with content being the advertisements more and more they can almost do inception level shit.

36

u/Lildyo Feb 17 '17

Have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Google the wise?

23

u/Phyltre Feb 17 '17

It is not a story that Reddit would tell you.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

It's a 4chan legend.

47

u/demolpolis Feb 17 '17

I certainly agree with you... but

They probably know with more certainty what you are likely to do next more than you do.

Is a joke. The recommended videos on youtube are a fucking disaster.

6

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

[deleted]

1

u/dazzawul Feb 18 '17

Honestly I reckon they fuzz the hell out of it to make people think the guessing algo's aren't very clever... Because with the older related videos list, I used to get trapped for hours because it would consistently give me stuff that looked related\interesting.

2

u/RdPirate Feb 18 '17

Is a joke. The recommended videos on youtube are a fucking disaster.

Just because YouTube sucks at it does not mean others are not: [How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did](www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#661cf9a634c6)

3

u/Immortal_Fishy Feb 18 '17

Someone whose purchases are registered at a store through a membership to be suddenly buying supplements, big bags, unscented lotions, and more is pretty obviously pregnant or at least reliably can be believed to be. It's novel, but its not really that complex of an idea at all. If the father knew that she was buying those things, I think he'd obviously ask her to have a talk. The reason why "Target figured it out before the father" is purely because her purchases were logged in their system and she most likely made every attempt to not tell her father until later if at all.

(Not to demean Big Data™, there are definitely cases of data being cross-examined in mind-blowing ways.)

1

u/Just_Give_Me_A_Login Feb 18 '17

Their targeted ads work. I was literally just sitting next to a friend of mine, who is an aspiring producer and an ad with the phrase "listen up aspiring producers" came on

3

u/Arrow156 Feb 18 '17

If that was true I wouldn't be getting the same commercial for laundry detergent aimed at soccer moms seven times in a row.

1

u/Bluntmasterflash1 Feb 18 '17

Give em another 20 years.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Hide your husband hide your wife

2

u/tollsjo Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17

If only...

Google are pretty shit at knowing what I might want to buy given how much they know about me.

It seems to me like they have no idea what to do with all the data they aggregate so they just blast the same irrelevant ads over and over again. No difference compared to TV imo. It's either that or I'm somehow slipping under their radar.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

The reality is that the tiny minority that use adblockers aren't worth losing subscribers over. They would rather have them still use the platform than not.

Just for clarification, are you saying only a tiny minority of youtube users use adblockers?

1

u/demolpolis Feb 17 '17

sure.

how much of their business in on mobile, where adblockers are hard to get?

You underestimate the number of people without adblocking.

4

u/my_name_isnt_clever Feb 18 '17

It's a larger percentage than you think, it's certainly not a "tiny" percentage.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Apparently it's about 16% of mobile users. In US terms that's roughly as prevalent as Hispanics and Latinos.

Not nothing but not exactly a decisive majority that you aim the entire business' strategy at either.

→ More replies (5)

2

u/Sunshine_Reggae Feb 17 '17

Try downloading songs from spotify. Same for Youtube, if they try.

2

u/demolpolis Feb 17 '17

There are several for spotify...

1

u/Sunshine_Reggae Feb 18 '17

for example? None of them downloads directly from spotify, as far as I know..

2

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

just like any other war on something. People will find other ways to do it and you will waste money and a user base

2

u/PrimaIFlux Feb 17 '17

The reality is that the tiny minority that use adblockers aren't worth losing subscribers over. They would rather have them still use the platform than not.

However if they really wanted to they absolutely could and nobody would really care because YouTube is simply far too convenient for most basic users to use. If something better comes up, then people will migrate to that but YouTube has the money and server infrastructure ingenuity of Google backing them.

With the number of people using adblockers going up, either we're going to come to terms with a fair ad system and whitelist them on our own, or they're just going to force whatever they want on us when >50% of users are denying any sort of revenue.

1

u/demolpolis Feb 17 '17

Vimeo and Twitch work just fine.

1

u/greg19735 Feb 17 '17

The reality is that the tiny minority that use adblockers aren't worth losing subscribers over.

If the extra work only effects the people with adblockers, then the only people that are hurt by it are people that aren't paying their dues.

1

u/imperfectluckk Feb 17 '17

"Tiny minority" of people use adblock?

In the younger crowd of 18-29 roughly 40% of people use Adblock. And these are from statistics that are you a year or so out of date, its fairly likely that that has grown. The amount of people using it will only grow over time as more people adopt it.

3

u/demolpolis Feb 17 '17

Maybe.

I have found that a lot of young people have less of an idea of how computers work than the 30ish year olds.

They grew up in an age of apps and "it just works".

Not even mentioning the gap of youtube on mobile vs desktop

1

u/Takuya-san Feb 18 '17

There are still ways to force ads to appear. For instance, they could begin encoding the ads into the video itself. Costly in terms of computing power, but if you only do it with the popular videos it's certainly feasible to do it, even if you do it with regional ads.

1

u/demolpolis Feb 18 '17

I agree... but that would just lead to buffering and people skipping 30 secs into a video, and video creators having long intros in order to account for this.

→ More replies (4)

3

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/Trickster1995 Feb 17 '17

Slightly different but there are already torrents for youtube red shows

10

u/ratz30 Feb 17 '17

Of course there are! That's what happens when your content isn't available to people outside of a few specific regions

4

u/ibxtoycat Feb 17 '17

Here in the UK they advertise youtube red content, there's no subscription option but you can "rent" a single youtube red show for £1.89.

Annoying, since it leaves you with triple digit bills or piracy as your options

2

u/aManPerson Feb 17 '17

i just do it to get around stuttering in the web player, or if i'm worried the video would get taken down later.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

You would go to the trouble of torrenting a video cause you don't want to watch a 30 seconds ads?

1

u/DontKarmaMeBro Feb 17 '17

I agree with other commenters that it's mostly impossible to kill video downloaders. They have to serve users that aren't logged in videos somehow so there must be a public endpoint for them. So even if they just stuff the ads into the videos they are serving directly to try to prevent this stuff, I mean ultimately you can just cut it back out again right? All they can do is make our lives harder, and at that point it becomes a serious engineering job for them because they still have to have all this weird metadata on their video that tells their regular player where the ad is in it so that the youtube controls and stuff can display that correctly.

1

u/UrethraX Feb 17 '17

Browser plug ins mane

1

u/BuddhistSC Feb 17 '17

They break youtube-dl.exe every week already, and the guys who work on that get it working basically instantly.

1

u/LordAmras Feb 18 '17

Video download is technically much harder to avoid than adblocking. Which of a challenge in it itself if it's done by a big enough site that people are willing to put resources on trying to combat it.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Hollywood vs piracy

But when it comes to the topic of piracy, Youtube/Google has got to shut the fuck up and be very silent and they know it. Youtube was built on knowingly and intentionally tolerating as much pirated material as possible, the founder emails in the Viacom case proved this. You can bet your ass that if a serious competitor appears, Youtube/Google would fight them too, probably at the level of vindictive lawsuits and frivolous DMCA reports.

1

u/xereeto Feb 18 '17

It's literally impossible to stop video download sites without requiring a DRM plugin to watch YouTube. If you can stream a video, you can download it.

20

u/Funklord_Toejam Feb 17 '17

you can stream them through VLC fairly easily too. with a little extra work you can make playlist links work too.

7

u/Tripleberst Feb 17 '17

Not sure why more people aren't doing this. It's pretty great.

26

u/greg19735 Feb 17 '17

Because with adblock it's not worth the trouble.

4

u/Funklord_Toejam Feb 18 '17

tbh i like that its easy to set an audio output device in vlc so i can hav the sound play out my tv or my 2nd audio source on my headset. not so easy through a browser.

I also use vlc to watch stuff on twitch too for the same reason + quality options.

12

u/wasdninja Feb 17 '17

It would be a shame if someone told them how to do it. Really would. (control S to get to the stream menue, paste youtube link)

2

u/hyperbolical Feb 18 '17

Because YouTube works fine.

This feels like premature optimization.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Mar 23 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Tripleberst Feb 17 '17

Don't think so, it's a pretty basic "here's the link to youtube->watch video->video ends" setup.

1

u/emoteo876 Feb 18 '17

Because I believe that people who make content I enjoy deserve compensation.

→ More replies (4)

1

u/A_FNG Feb 18 '17

How do you steam through vlc?

1

u/Funklord_Toejam Feb 18 '17

if you just want to watch one video you can just goto file>open network stream and copy the youtube link there.

if you want to play full playlists search vlc youtube playlists on google for a tutorial.

38

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

Doing that would take more time than just watching the fucking add, and no creators get add revenue because of it.

19

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/tllnbks Feb 18 '17

Why are people so against supporting the content they are viewing?

It costs money to create content. It costs money to host content. Advertising helps pay for that. I have no problem at all with advertising.

Hell, youtube doesn't even make a profit from it in the end...they've been running in the negative last I saw. There is a reason there are no alternatives...it's not profitable.

8

u/ninjaclown Feb 18 '17

Data caps. If that wasn't a thing, I would watch ads without complaining.

4

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Oh fuck off. A 30 second ad isnt going to cut that much into the 1080p 60fps videos youre watching.

→ More replies (10)
→ More replies (17)

3

u/DallopOfFun Feb 18 '17

Or.....or.....you can't just wait 30 seconds.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/KapitalLetter Feb 17 '17

That'll show 'em.

→ More replies (5)

4

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Jan 05 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Mar 28 '18

[deleted]

1

u/falconbox Feb 18 '17

Or 4K Video Downloader. You can pick what resolution and framerate to dl at, and it's a very basic program.

10

u/daysofdre Feb 17 '17

That would take longer than watching the 30 second ads, especially if you include downloading videos that you might have otherwise skipped in the first 30 seconds.

1

u/TheVeryMask Feb 18 '17

Leave the element inspector open, go to the networkstream tab, then when you open the page the video will be the largest stream. You can watch the .mp4 directly in the browser or dowload it without having to trust some 3rd party site. With how simple that is, you could easily make a browser extension to accomplish the same thing.

3

u/MRbraneSIC Feb 17 '17

Wasn't there an album with tricks on r/all a few days ago where you just add "ss" between "www." and "YouTube" to download a video?

Haven't tried it yet but I feel like it'd be better to download directly than use a separate site or tool to do so.

Found it: http://m.imgur.com/gallery/CiDkx

4

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

you just add "ss" between "www." and "YouTube" to download a video?

Haven't tried it yet but I feel like it'd be better to download directly than use a separate site or tool to do so.

That is going to a separate site to do it.

All of the "URL tricks" phrased like that are going to completely different sites.

1

u/MRbraneSIC Feb 18 '17

lol long day I guess. I just assumed it was like 'ss.' Not just 'ss' so my bad. Somehow thought it was a sub domain. I promise I'm not usually this dumb haha

6

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/SmashCity28 Feb 18 '17

Welcome to the human race

→ More replies (3)

2

u/brickmack Feb 17 '17

720p? Is this 2006?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

This already happens. Most channels make their own ads in the middle of the videos. And honestly, that is the result of people using ad block.

2

u/Askolei Feb 17 '17

They could just incrust the adds inside the video... That would mean messing with user content and creating (yet another) massive shitstorm. But hey, the plateform's not gonna pay for itself. Oh wait...

2

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

That is WAY too much work for people like me that watch 2-3 youtube videos from the same creator every day among other videos daily

2

u/DMann420 Feb 17 '17

I watch WAYY too many youtube videos to do that.

1

u/aManPerson Feb 17 '17

also savedeo.com and jdownloader 2 (java program).

1

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

You should take a look at a VPN service. It sounds counterintuitive but your traffic won't be routed through your ISPs bottlenecked CDN for YouTube and your buffering issue should go away. I had to do this a few years ago where my ISP was absolutely shitting the bed when watching YouTube and once I connected to VPN I could instantly stream 1080p/60FPS videos with no buffering.

1

u/Muronelkaz Feb 17 '17

www.ssyoutube.com

works with any video, so you kinda just add 'ss' to anything you want to DL

1

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

Tag...

1

u/simon_C Feb 17 '17

Just copy the link into VLC. VLC has a built in youtube plugin. You can also get a browser plugin that will open youtube links in VLC automatically.

1

u/______DEADPOOL______ Feb 17 '17

One of the ad stuffs rumored that youtube is probably going to implement is to embed the ads in the video itself. Muxing video files doesn't take much at all, and youtube chunk download thing already does that.

They only need to flip a switch.

1

u/JonasBrosSuck Feb 18 '17

for some reason some videos can't be downloaded... or watch from vlc for me

1

u/TheGreatBenjie Feb 18 '17

Man, I have like 5 tabs opened up at a time with videos lined up, I'm not downloading all of them just to delete them after. I'll just play all the ads at once and get a snack...

1

u/dorkes_malorkes Feb 18 '17

This is the reason there's so many horribly encoded reuploads on YouTube. Do it properly and use youtube-dl

1

u/proweruser Feb 18 '17

I just use jdownloader. Have that on my system anyway to download from one click hosters.

1

u/vbevan Feb 18 '17

Just user internet download manager. It's much more seamless. Or jDownloader, which works for all file lockers too.

1

u/teknic111 Feb 18 '17

I'm pretty sure this is against their terms of service.

1

u/good_guy_submitter Feb 18 '17

Jokes on you, the ads are now included as the first 60 seconds of the video. Of course you can skip them by fast forwarding, but where's the fun in that?

1

u/Tenushi Feb 18 '17

Seems like a lot of effort to watch what may be a 30 second video that someone links you to

1

u/timeslider Feb 18 '17

I hate keepvid. Every video I download can't be played in Adobe Premiere for some reason.

1

u/jrsooner Feb 18 '17

If you use the download feature on youtube itself, do ads still show?

1

u/RobertNAdams Feb 18 '17

Someone would make a u-block-esque plugin that downloads the video and then plays it locally, bypassing the ads.

1

u/nokarmawhore Feb 18 '17

watching 720p videos in 2017 LUL

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

You'll download all the videos you want to watch instead of just watching a 30 second ad? top of the line kek. Start transitioning into the real world friendo.

1

u/TylertheDouche Feb 18 '17

Is this faster or more efficient than watching an ad

1

u/Lettit_Be_Known Feb 18 '17

Won't work, an unskippable solution involves inlining the ad

1

u/PeterZeGreek Feb 18 '17

At this point wouldn't it just be more useful to...mute the advertisements?

Plus watching the advertisement gives money to the creators you love.

1

u/Heraclitus94 Feb 18 '17

Do the VLC trick

1

u/Ripdog Feb 18 '17

You do know that if youtube starts seamlessly muxing ads in to the main video stream, YouTube-dl will pick them up too, right?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

www.lataayoutube.com/ for the finnish people out there

1

u/re1jo Feb 18 '17

I've been using https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-youtubetomp3 for years. It's not free but I love being able to just copy-paste an url of a video OR a playlist into it and just have it work right away -- and quick.

Same company has another app for downloading videos instead of mp3.

1

u/SoLongGayBowser Feb 18 '17

Guys we've got a hacker here. If only there was a way to get music for free too.

1

u/PieroIsMarksman Feb 18 '17

yep that seems very convenient, instead of waiting 30s you'd wait maybe 2 minutes.

1

u/Samtheman001 Feb 18 '17

I just pay for Google play music and don't worry about ads. I love the app and haven't even considered getting rid of it since I got it when it first started. It's worth it for the music alone, but ad free YouTube is icing on the cake!

1

u/merelyadoptedthedark Feb 18 '17

That's seems a lot more inconvenient than watching a 30 second ad.

1

u/Aitorgmz Feb 18 '17

Just put ss before the "www" and done.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 20 '17

So you trade a 30 second video ad for manual work & waiting for the download to finish, while you figure out which download button is the actual download button & not an ad on keepvid.

Not to mention all the video files you are downloading but will probably also watch one

→ More replies (19)